Twitter blames outage on ‘unexpected complications’ during a planned deploy, fixes issue by reverting the change

At 2:05 PM EST today, Twitter went down. It’s not clear whether all users are affected or just a subset, but the social network is not accessible via the desktop site, mobile site, or its multiple apps. TNW staff from all around the world were suddenly logged out and weren’t allowed to log back into the site.

Update: The outage is over, please see updates at the bottom for more details.

Twitter pages are now showing a generic ‘Something is technically wrong’ error:

Twitter’s last service was last week according to status.twitter.com. Unfortunately, the Twitter Status page hasn’t yet been updated with information on today’s outage.

We have contacted Twitter about this issue. We will update this article when we learn more.

Update at 2:20 PM EST: Twitter tells us it is looking into the problem.

Update at 2:22 PM EST: While some tweets are starting to show up, some users are now reporting they are seeing the following “Twitter is currently down for maintenance” message.

As the message notes, Twitter Status has more information: “Most users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter on web and mobile apps. We’re looking into it.”

Pages are loading sporadically but overall the site appears to be working better than just 20 minutes ago, where not a tweet was to be seen.

Update at 3:30 PM EST: Twitter says the issue is resolved.

“During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am,” the latest update on Twitter Status reads. “We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

While the company says it has rolled back the change it made, at least one thing has remained: the “Connect” tab is now labeled “Notifications” on Twitter.com.

Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.